Vote for the Best Just Posts of 2009

Holly and I pleased to announce the unveiling of the final finalist list for the best Just Posts of 2009. In this post, you can find both the list of finalists by category, and the polls to vote for your favorite posts within those categories. [March 23, 2010: voting is now closed! Thank you for your votes! You can still scroll down to see the list of finalists. ]

Please vote! And spread the word. Spread the word to others to vote, contribute, nominate, write, and read!

Thank you thank you thank you for your interest, support, and involvement in the Just Posts!

Vote within as many categories as you like, but please vote only once in each category.

There’s no need to vote in all categories at once–come back as often as you like before voting ends.

We’ll have the polls up and open for one week.

At the end of the process, if you have voted in more than one category, we’d love to hear from you about which post you felt was the strongest of all you read. To vote on the “best of the best,” and to give additional feedback, you can go to this page.

At the end of Monday night, March 22nd, we will close the poll and start to tally the results. The top votes in each category will receive a hand-made tile from a New Orleans artisan with a few trinkets thrown in for good measure. Using your votes and any additional written input, we will recognize a post (or two, we’re not ruling out ties) as the Best of the Best Just Posts. We’ll do something extra special for this, we’re just not sure exactly what yet.

The process:
For those of you who are interested in the process, here’s a bit about our (imperfect) process of post and category selection.

Category selection:
Looking through our massive list of semifinalists, we (mostly Holly) created categories that reflected all of those 130+ posts. Then we went back to our readers’ comments and ratings and narrowed down the categories. We tried to represent a variety of voices, writers and experiences.

Here are the categories for the Best of the 2009 Just Posts. To see the posts for each category, and the polls for voting, scroll down, or click on a category name to jump right there:

In no way is this list or these categories representative of the broad theme of “Social Justice.” It represents what we’ve been able to gather, write and have nominated. If you there are topics and categories you’d like to see better represented in the Just Posts moving forward, we welcome your input. You can let us know in the comments, or using the form on this page. We also encourage you to write and nominate posts on topics that have been under-represented!

Post selection:
As you might imagine, choosing the finalists was tough. There were many excellent posts that we had to leave out, especially in categories with many posts. We also limited the number of posts that could be included by any one author to 2. Our goal was to narrow down the number of posts in a category to 3, a manageable number to read. (As you can see, we ended up with 4 posts in several categories…)

That is a very interesting question, christine. The extremely high proportion of female bloggers in the list reflects the high proportion of female authors of blogs that we read, and blogs that other people who nominate posts read. Overall, this reflects the high proportion of female personal bloggers in general. Posts by men are very welcome in the Just Posts, but fewer have been nominated in general. If you come across social justice posts written by personal bloggers who are men, we would enthusiastically welcome your nominations!

Great list of finalists. Including a category for humor is brilliant — it’s so overlooked but, historically, so important. J Swift, Jon Stewart — it’s all part of the same continuum. I admire writers who can get their digs in while keeping the tone seemingly light.

Thanks again guys, for putting this together. There are so many voices writing amazing stuff about topics that, whether you agree or disagree, keep us thinking and talking and doing. That’s how we affect change. =)

Thank you so much for including me among such fantastic and diverse writers. I usually get singled out for my posts on being a Brazilian bikini waxer so to garner note on the issue of feminism was a particularly proud moment. Those of us who can communicate via the written word do have an impact on the way other people think so when we risk talking about things that might be considered(I’m not sure why) borderline subversive, we help shape opinions. Thank you again for coming up with such a thoughtful and thought-provoking way to share.